Firehouse Productions once again served as the concert sound provider for GCF and this year switched over to an L-Acoustics K1/K2 PA system for the stage on the Great Lawn, where the 60,000 concert-goers in attendance also got to see guest appearances by Usher, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, Yandel, Yusuf/Cat Stevens and Coldplay's Chris Martin, creative director and curator of the festival, which is organized by the Global Poverty Project.
According to Firehouse system tech Jamie Pollock, "I had not done this show in previous years, and it already had a format, so when I got involved I tried not to shuffle things up too much. However, I knew that I wanted to use L-Acoustics products to take advantage of their long throw benefits and overall consistency that they can deliver for such a large-scale event.
"The main hang was 14 K1 with four K1-SBs above, on each side. We had 24 of the new KS28 subs set up as a line in the centre and an additional 16 SB28s used for the sides, plus 12 KARA in three stacks of four as front-fill in the centre. The delays were all K2; we had two lines of delays that were 12 boxes per hang for a total of 48 K2s."
This production was both demanding and challenging, says Pollock. "I knew it was going to be one of those shows where we needed every bit of resources we could get. We were limited to where we could put things on the Great Lawn and had to work within those guidelines.
"The PA was carefully calculated in Soundvision before installation, and when performing the system tuning onsite, I found my measurements translated nicely to what had been predicted. The system tools in LA Network Manager are invaluable and offer a resolution that helped me deliver very even homogenous coverage."
(Jim Evans)
